‘Cultural-National’ Autonomy¶
Core Argument¶
Here, Trotsky—writing under the name Lenin—launches a polemical demolition of the ‘cultural-national autonomy’ programme, a scheme for extra-territorial national schooling that was gaining traction among opportunist and nationalist currents within the Russian and Austrian socialist movements. The chapter’s core argument is that this programme is reactionary in its essence and impermissible from both a general democratic standpoint and, more emphatically, from the standpoint of the proletarian class struggle.
The central mechanism of the plan is the segregation of schools by nationality, irrespective of territory. Every citizen would register as belonging to a national association, and education would be administered by these associations, not the state. Trotsky argues this is a fraudulent swindle. He insists that in any modern state, different nations are bound by millions of economic, legal, and social ties. To artificially extricate education from these bonds and permanently divide nations along cultural lines is absurd and reactionary. The correct approach is to unite nations in education, preparing children for the integrated reality of economic life.
He provides concrete evidence of the reactionary character of such segregation. In the Southern United States, separate schools for Black children worsen their conditions, while the North, with integrated schools, is more advanced. In Russia, a plan for the ‘nationalisation of Jewish schools’—the segregation of Jewish children—originated in the most reactionary, Purishkevich circles. Trotsky argues that one cannot be a democrat and advocate for segregated schools.
The proletarian argument is even sharper. Capitalists of all nations are already united in joint-stock companies, cartels, and trusts against the workers. In any capitalist enterprise, workers are of mixed nationalities, and their class struggle teaches them internationalism. Segregating schools by nationality would split and weaken the workers, while the capitalists, whose children attend private schools, remain untouched. The idea was invented not by capitalists, who use cruder methods, but by the opportunist, philistine intelligentsia of Austria—a backward, feudal, clerical, bureaucratic state where petty squabbling over languages was rife. The psychology behind it is one of despair: since nations cannot agree, segregate them.
Trotsky notes that this idea was rejected by the Austrian Social-Democrats at their Brünn congress in 1899, who adopted only a compromise that did not provide for extra-territoriality or segregated schooling. Furthermore, Otto Bauer, the father of the idea, excluded the Jews from his own plan, proving his inconsistency. In Russia, the idea was adopted only by Jewish bourgeois parties, petty-bourgeois Left-Narodniks, and opportunist near-Marxists like the Bundists and liquidators. Trotsky mocks the liquidators for taking backward Austria as a model instead of advanced countries like France, Switzerland, or America. The Russian working class, he concludes, will continue to combat this pernicious, petty-bourgeois nationalist idea.